Imagine a large company that owns multiple large facilities across the country.  Each facility has its own local control system so that the property administrators and maintenance staff can control the HVAC, lights, exhaust fans, and more from a computer workstation that resides on the property.  The company is very energy conscious and wants to be able to monitor and have basic control over all of their properties’ control systems from their national headquarters.  Furthermore, they want to monitor and control them all from the same software, Continuum by Andover Controls.

There are multiple issues with integrating multiple large properties into one centralized piece of software.  Bandwidth, network reliability, data storage issues, and incompatible communication protocols are the first few that come to mind, and my focus was on bridging the gap on nearly 30 properties using two incompatible control systems: ASI Controls communicating via OPC and Continuum communicating via BACnet.

The software to bridge the gap had already been chosen (and to not divulge secrets, we’ll call it BTD for Bridge the Gap), so the real work was in learning Continuum, learning the BTD software, understanding the AEM (American Energy Management) implementations of ASI Controls, and coming up with a reasonable process to document and translate each property.

The first property was done manually and took approximately 50 hours, not including the R&D. Using Microsoft Excel automation and Visual Basic 6 (object oriented as much as possible) to automate much of the process, I reduced the time per property to 1-10 hours, depending on the size of the property, on subsequent properties.

Winning Results!

• Reduced turnaround time from 3 weeks down to 1 week. (including all work, rework, discovery, communication, and documentation)
• Cut costs amounting to 8% of the revenue per property. (imagine your margins going up by 8%!)
• Created a process to integrate ASI Controls into Continuum. (never been done before!)